# Template-free Data-to-Text Generation of Finnish Sports News

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.01863 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01863/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 4 Oct 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [GEMv2: Multilingual NLG Benchmarking in a Single Line of Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.11249/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Video Action Recognition in Sports: Datasets, Methods and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01038/) (2022)
- [BLEUBERI: BLEU is a surprisingly effective reward for instruction following](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11080/) (2025)
- [TaTa: A Multilingual Table-to-Text Dataset for African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00142/) (2022)
- [The Current State of Finnish NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.11326/) (2021)
- [Triples-to-isiXhosa (T2X): Addressing the Challenges of Low-Resource Agglutinative Data-to-Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07567/) (2024)
- [Automatic Generation of Factual News Headlines in Finnish](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02170/) (2022)
- [On Controlled Change: Generative AI's Impact on Professional Authority in Journalism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19792/) (2025)
- [Self-training from Self-memory in Data-to-text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10567/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

News articles such as sports game reports are often thought to closely follow the underlying game statistics, but in practice they contain a notable amount of background knowledge, interpretation, insight into the game, and quotes that are not present in the official statistics. This poses a challenge for automated data-to-text news generation with real-world news corpora as training data. We report on the development of a corpus of Finnish ice hockey news, edited to be suitable for training of end-to-end news generation methods, as well as demonstrate generation of text, which was judged by journalists to be relatively close to a viable product. The new dataset and system source code are available for research purposes at https://github.com/scoopmatic/finnish-hockey-news-generation-paper.